Why Marianne Gingrich Told Me About a Vulnerable Newt

It was the racism that threw me. As a reporter, I've always believed that everyone has some kind of inner coherence. No matter how inexplicable their behavior may be, there is always logic somewhere.

This proved true with a multitude of subjects, from murderers to movie stars. Until Newt Gingrich.

When Newt Gingrich is in campaign mode, he has a very strict script and repeats the same slogans in every speech. In April, toward the beginning of my reporting for a new profile on him in the September issue of Esquire, I spent a day with Gingrich in New Orleans, going from one conservative event to another. And at least three times, I heard him make the same crack about President Obama's athletic abilities. First it was with a group of small businessmen: "The more angry we get, the worse it is for Obama. I don't care how many three-point jump shots he makes."

Next, he said it to a group of Tea Party leaders: "The national news media is pathetic. They keep talking about his three-point basketball shot and not the 17 percent under-employment. Those are the most expensive basketball shots in history — $1 million a shot."

The last time, he was giving a speech to thousands of Republican activists from the Southern Republican Leadership Conference: "Shooting three-point shots is clever but doesn't put anyone back to work. We need a president, not an athlete."

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Gingrich never mentioned it exactly, but he seems to have been talking about Obama shooting a few hoops with the troops during a visit to Kuwait. The media, shockingly, filmed it. But it's probably not fair to say that the media keeps talking about it since that trip to Kuwait took place in July of 2008, two years earlier.

Now, you can argue that it was a waste of money for a Senator to visit the troops. It's a bit harder to say the trip cost $1 million a basket, because Obama also talked to the president of Afghanistan and the prime minister of Iraq.

I interviewed Gingrich the very next day, in fact, at his complex of offices on K Street — Washington's lobbyist row — and this is what he said about Obama:

I have a lot of respect for him. I fundamentally passionately disagree with his ideological position, with the way he's trying to do it, I think it's extraordinarily dangerous and destructive. But as a person, he's clearly very, very smart and very, very disciplined, and he has a very good sense of language, and he's formidable.

But in front of a large group of Southern conservatives, Gingrich chose to associate the president with athletics. He didn't mention fried chicken or watermelon, but he didn't have to. Just before he made the jump-shot crack, one member of the audience called Obama "the Kenyan." Gingrich said nothing. Another complained about all the shiftless people living on welfare in New Orleans. Gingrich didn't say anything then, either.

But he did speak up when someone bashed Mexicans, saying that they were often good, hardworking people. That puzzled me. What was the point of that? Was he just trying to position himself as a reasonable person? Was it pure strategy? Or was it a glimpse into the real feelings buried under the man's political calculations?

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When I read Newt Gingrich's books, I saw that this was part of a pattern. He often says that huge majorities of Americans support basic conservative values, for example, just before attacking Democrats as decadent socialist elitists. But then how can huge majorities support basic conservative values?

When I asked him directly, it became clear very quickly that it was a waste of my time. Gingrich was there to get out his message, not to answer questions. It was all just a pointless kind of shadowboxing, the kind of stuff you see on TV when reporters are clever and politicians are slick and it all has about as much relation to the truth as Ultimate Fighting cage matches have to war.

I asked a couple of Washington Democrats who knew Gingrich from the '90s. They said he had no real values and would say anything for power. Republicans told me he was a political visionary who only wanted to restore America's greatness. Both answers seemed simplistic.

So I went looking for people who really knew him. One call went to John Mayoue, the lawyer who represented Gingrich's second wife, Marianne, in their divorce. "In thirty-two years of law practice, this was the strangest divorce I've ever seen," he told me. "It was simply bizarre and inexplicable."

As we got into the details, I saw what he meant. Instead of settling fast to preserve his reputation and political future — and 95 percent of all divorce cases are settled before a court judgment — Gingrich seemed determined to make himself look as bad as possible. He simply refused to answer any deposition questions about his history of infidelity, for example, although they were clearly pertinent to a divorce case. You can still hear Marianne's pain and Mayoue's indignation in the "interrogatories" they filed with the court (for example: "Do you believe you've conducted your private life in agreement with the values you've professed in your personal life?"). This practically guaranteed that the press would write about his squalid sex life and the bizarre coincidences in his two divorces, from the apparent nervous breakdown that preceded them to the fact that Marianne and Jackie (Gingrich's first wife, who was his high school geometry teacher and whom, I would later learn, he started dating at sixteen) had both been diagnosed with grievous illnesses when Gingrich suddenly decided to divorce them. But the instant the judge ordered him to answer, he settled.

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There are words for this. Weird. Erratic. Maybe Machiavellian, if you believe Mayoue's theory that Gingrich was trying to intimidate Marianne into silence with a strong attack. But those words do not include "future presidential material."

Mayoue told me that Marianne had never talked about what happened, partly because she was planning to write a book. But if I could tell him what I wanted to know, he'd be happy to pass on the message.

I told him that I wanted help figuring out Gingrich. I didn't care if the answer was positive or negative, but I couldn't believe he was just a black-and-white monster like all the Democrats said. For one thing, it wasn't fair to say he didn't believe in anything. He'd always been for small government and a strong defense. What I wanted was simply to understand.

Mayoue told me that in ten years, nobody had ever asked for that. They only called when they wanted a quick attack quote, and Marianne wasn't interested in handing out attack quotes. But she might be interested in this.

So began a month of back-and-forth phone calls. Finally I ended up in Florida and got totally lost trying to find her condo. No worries, Marianne said, hopping in her car to drive out and find me.

We met in a parking lot. Her hair was windblown. She wore jeans and no makeup. She was driving one of those hybrid cars that has a pickup bed in the back, the kind we used to call a "cowboy Cadillac" back when I lived in New Mexico. She smiled, she hugged me, she told me to follow her. We ended up talking for nine hours that day and ten the next.

Marianne was a trip. She was goofy and fun and almost completely unguarded, reeling off the stories and digressions with a wry sense of the human comedy that was very appealing. She was not bitter about the divorce or angry at Gingrich, but it was clear that she'd been brooding about what happened for years, that the divorce introduced a note of unreality that permanently shook her life — she'd been going along thinking everything was one way for eighteen years and then suddenly it wasn't that way. "Good became bad and bad became good," she said repeatedly. She talked a lot about faith and acceptance and forgiveness but, frankly, the doubt seemed to be buried pretty deep. It was all so human and touching.

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And confusing. How could this woman have been married to Newt Gingrich for eighteen years? How could such a free spirit live with such a calculated, almost Machiavellian strategist? Clearly, I was going to have to rethink Newt Gingrich.

My skeleton key turned out to be one of Marianne's hard-won insights: We mislead ourselves with glib remarks about politicians all being corrupt, she said, when the real question is when did they become corrupt, and why. Here's the whole quote:

Newt grew up poor, always wanted to be somebody, make a difference, prove himself. That was his vulnerability, do you understand? Being treated important. Which means he was gonna associate with people who would stroke him, and were important themselves. And in that vulnerability, once you go down that path and it goes unchecked, you add to it. Like, 'Oh, I'm drinking, who cares?' Then I start being a little whore, 'cause that comes with drinking. That's what corruption is: when you're too exhausted, you're gonna go with your weakness. So when you see corruption, you don't wanna say 'They're all corrupt.' You wanna say, 'At what point did you decide that? And why? Why were you vulnerable?'

You can see how it all played out in the new issue of Esquire, and all week here on The Politics Blog.